


Hover and Twist

by arcanemoody



Series: The Summer of Smut [14]
Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: (sort of), Clothed Sex, Dom/sub Undertones, Established Relationship, Grinding, Hair-pulling, Hand Jobs, Light Angst, M/M, Mild Blood, Oral Sex, Past One Night Stand mention, Porn With Plot, Porn with Feelings, Post-Episode: s05e11 They Did What?, s05e12: the beginning doesn't exist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:40:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25326292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arcanemoody/pseuds/arcanemoody
Summary: A routine “retrieval” goes awry.
Relationships: Oswald Cobblepot/Edward Nygma
Series: The Summer of Smut [14]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1787152
Comments: 14
Kudos: 65





	Hover and Twist

**Author's Note:**

> Nygmobblepot Discord _Summer of Smut_ Prompt: "Hair Pulling."

Compared with previous abductions, it’s been a fairly painless afternoon… if only because Ed can’t immediately recall most of it. 

He wakes up on a familiar woman's shoulder, already dodging fire from the GCPD, the smell of kerosene and gunpowder peppering the air. 

The circumstances can’t be _that_ dire, he reasons. He’s not even restrained that he can tell (apart from the sting of his cohort’s claws poking through the weave on his suit jacket). Two months into reunification with the mainland, there are few people in the city who might have a ransom or violent motive. Except he dimly recalls Selina has been screaming for what seemed like hours. At a young man who looks an awful lot like… 

"Oh, crud,” he coughs.

"Agreed," Selina huffs, speeding up as they dart around a corner, another explosion sounds in the distance. “Shut up and we might just get out of this.”

He saves his breath, swallows thickly and ducks as a shot ricochets off concrete nearby. The soreness in his throat indicates recent strangulation. He doesn’t think it was Selina -- that’s not where this dread is coming from (like a veil or heavy shadow in his mind…).

Selina has no recent reason to kidnap him or strangle him. They’ve been in something of a honeymoon period with the Sirens for a while now. It helps that the stakes for territory are low in a city that’s only ten weeks into being rebuilt. The cargo from the sub had been recovered and split four ways. Oswald and Barbara were making a show of re-investing their energies in assets they already owned on paper, building their case for two cooperative crime lords “gone legit;” each worthy of the pardon and the fresh start they'd been given. 

The negotiation process has been long, with increased scrutiny on all of them; forcing them to adopt creative maneuvers in order to move the “off-paper” assets around.

Tonight’s collaboration had involved the last of Sofia Falcone's accounts at the still-abandoned (but, miraculously, still standing) First Bank of Gotham. They had negotiated another four-way split minus a “finder’s fee” going to Lee for the clinic’s support and the continued rebuild in the Narrows. Ed had kept his covert surveillance team on a convoluted "suspicious activity" trek through the city for most of the day, tying up Gordon's resources while Selina worked on the retrieval. Everything had been in place, and then Selina had failed to show at the drop site. It was concerning enough for Ed to lose his rent-a-cops up a newly bulldozed alley. It was not concerning enough to send an emergency signal to the others. 

He regrets that now, as a sea of red and blue lights greets them at the back door, making his headache worse.  
  
"And that was our last way out,” Selina releases him carefully, setting his feet back on the ground before putting both of her hands up. “Time to go quietly."

"Just remember, we're the victims here," he says, following suit. 

"Right," she says, dryly. "By the way, thanks for trying to cheer me up before."

Ed starts to ask her what she’s talking about, right as a uniformed officer throws him against the rear door of a squad car. 

\--

Returning to the station in handcuffs is always demoralizing. Ed feels the injustice keenly as the pain in his wrists makes his fingers go numb while Selina has already escaped her own cuffs. She stalks across the bullpen, a bundle of flailing limbs and shouted demands while he staggers over the front stairs between a pair of uniformed officers.

Their entrance is quickly followed by the _crash-bang_ of Jim Gordon’s office door. Their illustrious commissioner emerges first, followed by Lee, then Barbara (baby on the hip, a familiar mix of shock and consternation on her face) and, finally, Oswald.

The eye that’s not covered by the patch is pale and wide, lips parted. He’s wearing a different shirt than he was when he saw him this morning (dark linen, better for the cold bite of early spring than the black cotton button-ups they’ve been trading off for more than a year) and a Merton frock coat that once belonged to his father. He grips the bannister, visibly holding back from vaulting down the stairs in Ed’s direction. Even heading up the rear, his breathing is labored and restrained (he's been holding his breath for months and thinks Ed doesn’t notice).

The commotion that follows is difficult to decipher through what Ed suspects might be a concussion. After a few minutes he stops trying.

“You have to go there _now_ ,” Selina’s face is red as she rakes Jim, Harvey, and everyone else over the coals. 

"Bruce is over 18, Selina. We can’t just--"

"It wasn’t Bruce!"

"She’s quite correct," Pennyworth echoes from his place next to Lucius. "Master Wayne is not in Gotham. I contacted him four hours ago."

"I'm sorry? We're supposed to believe a teenager _didn't_ lie to their guardian when he called to check in?" Bullock asks, sarcastically.

" _It. Wasn’t. Bruce._ It was Five," Selina says, with a steely conviction that belies her age. Though the blank stares of the adults around her don’t make the case for age being a premium on logic. “That’s his name! He’s one of Strange's experiments.”

“We caught all of Strange’s experiments. Everyone that escaped Arkham the first time—”

“But not when the bridges blew,” Lee supplies. “Strange always finds a way. He's done it before.”

"Done what?! _Cloning?!_ ” Bullock, the seasoned expert who can't be shocked by anything but doggedly pursues mundane explanations at the first sign of trouble; somehow hitting on the correct answer without even trying _yet again_... 

Ed holds his breath as his airways choke off and his head fills with static…

  
  
_Bruce Wayne... No, of course it’s not Bruce Wayne – even Ed can see that in poor lighting through the blood in his eyes and a dull throb where the rigged paint can collided with his skull. It's a capable likeness: he has the voice and the mannerisms, does his hair the right way. The scar above his eye can be explained away by his recent absence. But the way he stands, bearing his wait forward like a predator with an immediate objective... that is not something a person picks up in ten weeks._

_“We’re the same.”_

_They’re not._

_“You won’t have to be alone again. Whatever you needed from him,_ **_I can give that to you._ ** _”_

_Thinking only of survival, the existential threat of a former foe getting the drop on him in his hiding place... but if he can move her, maybe he’ll be safe. The offer is as cruel as the strategy is sound. And it makes Ed abruptly furious. Particularly the way this golem’s words have caused his cohort to visibly freeze, cracks in the mask widened by grief, abandonment, false promise. The part of him that so often allows him to ignore others’ pain evaporates. Staggering to his feet, Ed wordlessly forms a barrier between the heartbroken cat burglar and the bleak pretender._

_“Riddle me this, young man: I try to make what is already there, cell by cell, breath by breath. I won't blink, I won't talk, I won't smile unless you do. What am I?”_

_The boy with Bruce Wayne’s face stares at him._

_“An imitation. Alive on the surface, yet dead inside. Not real--”_

_The answer had earned him a punch to the face, then another. His laughter stopped when a hand clamped across his throat, sending an explosion of stars behind his eyelids and then everything had gone dark.._.

  
  
There’s a damp cloth on his head. The smell of musty paper towels from the men’s room, a trace of familiar citrus notes and silk. He wonders what ‘my head hurts’ face he’s making if Oswald isn’t even trying to interrogate him about what happened or how he ended up with a gash in his forehead and fingermarks around his throat. Oswald doesn’t say a word, his high-strung emotional extremes fully channeled into caretaker mode. Ed’s chest hurts as the sensory overload continues.  
  
“Not even Strange had access to the kinds of resources we're talking about here. And _you_ said your little Wayne friend—”

Selina plants a knife into a nearby desk at his use of the word ‘friend.’ 

“Harvey, you need to stop talking to her that way _now!_ ” Barbara’s shout sets off Barbara Lee, who immediately begins shrieking.

Words fade to a dull roar of Pennyworth and Jim shouting at Bullock, the baby crying, Selina fighting to make herself heard above them all. Ed keeps his eyes on the ground as Oswald wordlessly unlocks his cuffs, rubbing at the red marks on his wrists. The delicate touch makes him want to cry, want to scream. 

“— _when?!”_

"Three years ago,” Ed says. He doesn't look up. The trembling fingers on his wrist and the silence that diffuses the bullpen are answer enough. 

Somehow, Jim’s silent bewilderment is always louder than anything in the room.  
  
"GAH! Fine!" Bullock surrenders. "I'll take her, you take him."

"You're not taking Ed anywhere without me, Jim." Oswald’s own voice is raw, tone resolute; floating on adrenaline after what must have been hours of drinking the station's terrible coffee and yelling at Barbara and/or Lee.

"You're more than welcome to come along,” Jim replies. 

\--

Room A is the second largest interrogation room at the station, with the largest mirror; dark reverse-tinted glass that wobbles when various observers take their place behind it. The vibration on the surface is like ripples on a pond at night. Ed watches it for a long moment, the cold pack on his head melting so that recycled paper and damp orange-scented water beads and runs down his face,slotted into fine lines where tears might fall. If he could remember the last time he’d cried...

Jim enters the actual room alone. Ed turns his face away from the dark glass.

“Where’s Foxy?”

“Getting that file you asked for.” A shake of a pill bottle. “Want some aspirin?” 

He withdraws, turns inward even as his gaze returns to the dark glass (and the “observer” just beyond it).

"Strange was under the Court of Owls." Jim Gordon's cautious footsteps, the tidy placement of the pill bottle in front of him making him want to shred the expensive fibers of his jacket sleeves. 

"I knew that."

Ed looks up. Patronizing blue eyes gone still with rationalized guilt. He stifles the urge to hurl the melting ice in his hand against the wall, to watch with satisfaction as the liquid explodes and the remaining solid pieces shatter.

"Did you know it when you handed me over to them?" 

There’s a larger ripple this time and an ominous bang behind the two-way mirror startles them. It makes Ed lift his head a little higher and, apparently, gives Gordon an out to not answer. 

He sighs. 

"The Court was funding his private hobbies. So was the GCPD. How much Essen and Barnes knew, I don’t know. But every unclaimed body that was processed through Arkham under their tenure, all or part of them ended up in Indian Hill. The gene research he conducted... you’ll need to crossmatch this with the Wayne Enterprises data but it wasn't just mismatching parts and metahuman DNA. Some projects were just efforts to duplicate the existing samples."

A knock at the door. Lucius enters with the file folder and a stack of papers. Ed signs the release form on top, handing it to Jim before grabbing the folder. 

“’Permission to exhume.’ _Who?_ ”  
  
Ed is already sorting through the file. He flips through page after page of the coroner’s report before finally landing on a familiar photo. 

" _Kristen?_ "

“No,” he shakes his head. 

Jim's gaze softens even as his mouth turns down in horror.

"Her name was Isabella Flynn. At least, that’s the name they gave her. They sent her to me six weeks after the election,” he swallows. “I knew her for five days before she died."

"How do you know she was under the Court? Did she tell you?"

" _They_ told me." He sets the remainder of the ice on the table, stripping and refolding the dark handkerchief with the familiar embroidery. He sets the damp square across his eyes, mops his forehead. “After it was done.”

A beat. Whatever non-verbal exchange passes between Gordon and Lucius, Ed is glad it passes as he closes his eyes. His head hurts enough.

"...I think we’re going to need a little more than that, Ed."  
  
Lucius’ eyes are warm to Jim’s cold, even with grim lines around his mouth. Foxy himself just needs to know what they’re facing to keep everyone safe and for that reason, Ed addresses the remainder of his story to Lucius alone. 

"She took lysine. Prescribed by the pharmacy next to the bank. If you don't believe me, you can ask Dr. Thompkins. Half of the bottles I kept at Cherry's were from Isabella's medicine cabinet. She asked me about it early on when I was staying there. If you want to run mitochondrial DNA against existing samples from Miss Kringle's case, she should still be buried in Founders’ Cemetery."

The second corpse that had ever struck and choked him was still out there. A lich wearing Bruce Wayne's face that thought nothing of feeding off the reactions he got from the people who were attached to those features. Whatever his plans were beyond survival in a destabilized city, they couldn’t be good. 

“You might want to rush the paperwork. The replicated DNA was apparently unstable. But given what we saw with Miss Kyle’s attacker, there may be mutations and adaptations Strange wasn’t aware of when he was forced to discontinue the project.” 

“And?” Foxy holds up the exhumation form bearing Ed’s signature.

“I paid for her plot. She left me in charge of all of it. The officers called me after the accident. She told me she was an orphan. I…,” his voice trails off. “...should have been more probing. It was difficult to think straight back then. After Arkham and before...”

The door opens slowly this time. 

"Detectives, do you have everything that you need?"

"More than enough," Gordon’s gruff bite is softer than usual, almost sympathetic. Like he cares. Or perhaps is just mirroring the ones in the room that do. "You're both free to go."  
  
\--

"I want to wash up,” he says, cringing at the stilted way the words come out. He’s already walking ahead of his partner, eyes glued to the familiar door of the ‘family’ washroom at the end of the hallway.

"Of course,” Oswald says, following closely, even as the door shuts between them. “Take your time."

The water that comes out of the tap is bitterly cold and tastes like rust. He splashes his face, trying to force himself to swallow it, though his throat muscles can’t quite make it work. 

The pain in his head is dissipating, replaced with a familiar fuzziness. He’s in his body and _not in his body_ even as his heart jackhammers in his chest, making it hard to catch his breath. Like every episode he’s had since he was fifteen years old, it’s the same script: panic attack, depersonalization, auditory and visual hallucinations. 

Depersonalization was always his favorite. If he could amp up the anxiety and conflict and make them flood his brain with enough dopamine, he could make the depersonalization stage last forever. 

Jim handing him off to the Court like a rabid dog to be put down had felt like nothing. As empty as he’d ever been. The void had filled up quickly with the Court's boasts, sharp anguish and futility; the certainty that life had no meaning and he was going to die without an answer or being attached to anyone who cared for him at all. The miserable fact that the loving, happy memories he’d made in less than a week were all ruined, and possibly not even as good as he had first recalled. A contrived falsehood, a cozy little house built on top of a collapsing sinkhole. For which Ed had forfeited the only good and real thing in his life.

Until the cell door next to his was flung open. 

Mopping the excess water from his face, he puts his glasses back on and watches the mirror, waiting. 

The mirror remains empty. He punches it just to be sure, landing another blow that splits and shatters the glass along with his knuckles; then the one next to it, then the one after that. The sound of someone loudly clearing their throat finally stops his progress.

Barbara, pumping on the padded bench, looks perturbed, with a spark of recognition in her eyes. 

“All right, Ed,” she says, displacing the shield and buttoning her top. “The lactation room is all yours.”

He slowly collapses on the floor, sitting back against the wall. He eyes the broken reflective fragments decorating the filthy tile. He doesn’t look up when the door opens again and a familiar gait limps inside. The wheel-lock on the door spins shut with a twitch of Oswald’s fingers.

“I take it the goal was to destabilize us?"

"The last of my kind at the end, though second to last at the start. I circle the middle, looking for me, but three little letters is all that I see.” A beat. “‘You.’ Their goal was to destabilize _you_. I was just a prop, at best." 

An annoyingly efficient prop, making it hard for them to maintain their hold on the city even after the first mayor not on their payroll in a century had been dispatched. The steely woman in charge had confessed an affinity for his "poetics,” even as she reminded him of his redundancy. As though the long form and insidious plan they'd mapped out had been lacking in poetry, or redundancy.

"The goal was to get me sent back to Arkham for killing her,” he continues. “Smearing you and casting doubt on your leadership so you’d eventually be displaced from your role. Kathryn herself took great satisfaction in informing me of how, together, we actually _accelerated_ her plans."

"When did she tell you that?"

"In interrogation. Right before they put me in the cage."

Oswald silently fills in the blanks. "Why didn't you say something?"

"I was still _mad_ at you!" He slaps at Oswald’s shin – the one part he can still reach while seated against the wall. 

"Okay,” he replies, stepping back. “And later?" 

…later.

Ed closes his eyes, letting his head fall back against the wall.

Not after they had mended, not after they started working together again. After Penn and Scarface, after the sonar and tidying up the mess in the library. After the mad ventriloquist's body was appropriately "relocated" back into the cold storage motel that was the GCPD morgue (because Penn had been right when he was reading Oswald the riot act, and Oswald had owed him more than the typical body disposal). They’d rolled up to the precinct in plain sight, carrying the body bag through the back passage and nearly being caught by a pair of Haven survivors searching Foxy’s office for contraband. 

They’d waited 20 minutes on the morgue floor, silent and still until the stragglers had gone; laughing breathlessly even as the lights went out. Adrenaline pumping at how they had slipped into a crowded police precinct with minimal effort (again), the thrill of escaping detection, renewed connection... something had ignited. 

The term “one-night stand“ was a misnomer. “One-time encounter” didn’t work either as there had been a few times: fumbling in the dark on the floor of the morgue, against the lab door, against what years of muscle memory told Edward was an autopsy table (the bruise on his arm from the grid plate had been there for days afterward). The individual instances ran together to the point where he couldn’t even recall how they eventually escaped and made their way back to their respective dwellings at the library and the citadel.

It was (ecstatic, inevitable)... _unexpected_. 

They'd agreed to talk about it later -- kicking the matter down the road until after the sub was built and they were across the river; free to start over away from Gotham. Now, after the barricade and that night by the fire in the library, broaching the subject felt… awkward. 

"Ed?” Oswald’s voice is somber. “Do you need me to go somewhere else?"

Panic surges through him. He bolts up to his knees, heedless to the mirror shards littering the tile, and throws his arms around Oswald's middle and dragging him to stand in front of him.

"O-okay.”  
  
“If I _had_ killed her, I still would have had you.” Lifting the shroud on that confession feels momentous, physically painful. He‘s kneeling on broken glass as he says it. Poetic indeed.

“I’m glad you didn’t. I'm sorry it hurt you—.”

He presses his face to his best friend’s ribs. A sound escaping his throat... an ancient grief from the darkest part of himself. The same part that's only mollified when he feels fingers petting his hair.

“Are you mad at me now?”

“I’m not mad.”

“You just smashed three mirrors.”

“That wasn’t about being _mad_.”

“What was it about then? And please don’t tell me ‘redecorating.’” The worry is palpable, even cloaked in dark humor. 

He hasn’t split. Not in the nine months they spent plotting their escape, not in the last three they’ve been rebuilding. Oswald hasn’t so much as caught him lingering too long in front of his reflection or talking aloud in an empty room. But Oswald’s been holding his breath around this too; the way he used to talk about holding his punches in Fish’s employ. Always afraid to betray just how much he knew or his will to use it. 

The hand in his hair strays down to his cheek. Ed nuzzles into it without thinking, without discerning the meaning or motive.

“You have to tell me if you’re dissociating. We agreed.”  
  
“ _You_ agreed,” he spits out, leaning back against the tile wall. “I would love to dissociate right now. Do you have any idea how easy the world is when I don’t have to feel anything?!”

Oswald doesn’t rise to the bait. And he doesn’t take his hand away. Instead, he does his best to move closer even with a wall behind them.

“I asked you for something and you said I could have it.”  
  
Ed says nothing, still hiding his face against warm linen, veiled by the velvet edge of his jacket.  
  
“Anything you need from me, you can have. Don’t you know that?”  
  
“The king of Gotham suddenly cares about equity?”  
  
“It’s not sudden, but, admittedly, I should have started sooner. There’s a case for benevolent rule: everyone should get what they need.”

“Are you ever going to include yourself in that?” he asks. “You already threw yourself on a grenade! Your lifetime quota for sacrifice is up.”  
  
“Love is _about_ sacrifice,” he replies. “The least you can do is tell me if you recall that or if Riddler only saw it from the shadows.”

Having his own words echoed back to him is catalyzing… as is the implication of just what Oswald’s asking. Ed stands up to his full height, leaning into his best friend, who doesn’t retreat or back down. Just stands firm even as Ed’s own equilibrium deserts him.

“I didn’t split at the barricade and I didn’t split tonight,” he says. “I haven’t split in more than a year and I remember everything. This is me. _All of me_.”  
  
Oswald’s hand is on his shoulder, sliding up towards his cheek. 

“That’s what I wanted.”

He kisses his best friend, and silently thanks fate for the pressure he gets in return, along with a distracted hum of want and need. 

Kissing Oswald, he decides, is better with the lights on. Multi sensory, amplifying touch, taste, smell. It’s an abrupt reversal of months of careful routine and restraint; suddenly everything is both halted and frenzied, wrong, stop, no, yes. He starts to kneel only to have Oswald seize his arms half-way down. Settling into a spraddle-seated stance against the wall, caged in by friend’s thighs. Wool and silk, the salt of days of sweat. He leans in to nose his last few shirt buttons aside, to rub his cheek against the front of his trousers. The grip on his forearms slips allowing his large hands to settle on Oswald’s knees, massaging the right one as he breathes in. Ed whimpers at the sting of short fingers in his hair tugging lightly, moaning as they tug a bit harder. Oswald looks down, quirks an eyebrow.

“Ed?” 

“Th- _that_ has nothing to do with anything else! I just like it!”

“Noted. Like this?” He cards his full hand through and pulls. 

“Ahhhhh… “  
  
Oswald responds by pulling him up by his hair, back sliding along the wall. Kissing and nuzzling, the sting of his follicles followed by the scrape of rough fingernails across his scalp, he moans low in his throat. His left leg skirts the outside of Oswald’s pant leg, his own erection grazing shin and knee and making a shudder run down his spine. 

Addendum: kissing Oswald is better, _period_. Better than before, better than with the others. He pulls back and Ed chases... off-balance as gravity deserts him and he swoons, nearly dragging them both down to a floor full of broken glass. Only Oswald hooking his cane on the door handle stops them from slipping.  
  
“Sorry!“

“It’s all right!”  
  
“There’s a bench that way. I want to go to there,“ he blurts out before being abruptly dragged aross the room.  
  
Oswald lands on the cushions with a creak of aging wood and leather, Ed still scrambling to get to his knees and Oswald, again, impeding him. The bench is barely the width of a twin cot. The repositioning of their bodies takes on an absurd, frenzied shifting form, connected, hands grabbing for openings in clothing. A rare touch of skin to skin makes him toss his head initially, forcing Oswald to take another handful of his hair for purchase.

He’s bleeding, concussed, dizzy, panting, surrounded by the flesh, smell and embrace of the person he loves the most. A graze of teeth again at his neck makes him shiver down to his toes. His tie disappeared somewhere between the bank and the GCPD, and now Oswald attacks his shirt buttons and belt greedily.  
  
“No, no…,” he whimpers, grabbing at Oswald to prevent him from sliding down further. He thrusts his hips, seeking friction. “... both of us.”  
  
“We’d need to get naked for that. Ed, _please._ ”

Ah. Ed nods. Bad idea. His own fault for turning the place into a sharps hazard.  
  
“Then _I_ want to.”

Oswald’s smile is bright as he leans in to nip at Ed’s jaw.

“You can try,” he whispers; challenge accepted.

Wrestling was never a particular skill either of them could boast about having… but they make a valiant effort without falling from their tenuous perch. Oswald is on his back while Ed fumbles clumsy fingers under his shirt placket (tremendous warmth radiating from this spot and slightly lower…) his fingers skim over his abdominal muscles, up to the ribs, nipple, collarbone.

Oswald pins his wrist so his hand is planted against his sternum, right before his good leg comes up to hook under Ed’s elbow, tipping him back against the wall.

“Didn’t want it that much, did you?” Oswald murmurs between kisses.  
  
“Mmmm...”

Oswald covers his mouth with a leather gloved hand and his eyes roll toward the back of his head. Moans reverberate deep in his chest as Oswald moves down, licking the scar from where Lee stabbed him. He wraps his calf around his partner’s shoulder, back arching half off the threadbare cushion.

A familiar hand reaches inside his pants, cool, clever fingers draw him out, waiting lips and tongue migrating south to meet them.

“Don’t make a sound.“

Ed attempts to say that's not going to be a problem for much longer; words muffled by the taste of leather and sweat and blood flooding his mouth. He comes, biting down on Oswald's gloved palm to stop himself from screaming. When he catches his breath, he shuffles down, knees tugging his smaller lover upward to shove his own hand into his open fly. 

Oswald comes as silently as he remembers, though seeing him is a revelation: panting and red-faced, jaw tight, leaning his face in to touch his brow against Ed’s, a mewl deep in his throat the only warning beforehand. 

Their breathing slows raggedly, in concert. Oswald tastes like burnt coffee and salt as Ed kisses him lazily. His blood is on Oswald’s shirt and his face. His semen is on his fingers. The sweat on his brow mingles with the citrus and sandalwood from his pocket square. The euphoria lasts approximately three minutes before the world tilts 45 degrees as the legs of the bench finally give out. 

“Can we do this again somewhere else?” he blurts out, suddenly perpendicular. “ _Please?_ “

“Yes,“ Oswald swiftly agrees.  
  
\--  
  
He remembers now.

The last instance in that “one-time encounter.” How Oswald had crab-walked out from under him and practically run for the door. How the lights had come back on in the morgue just as he was re-fastening the boiler suit (borrowed from Ed and several inches too long). _“We don’t need to talk about it!” he’d rushed out,_ leaving Ed cold as he watched his friend duck through the exit. Without him.

He doesn’t feel cold now as his lover settles behind him under his quilt, nestling against his back.  
  
“You should grow this back out,” he whispers, smoothing his hair back. “Then we can do that thing you like all the time.”  
  
“Please...” he laughs, smiling at the kiss that lands at his temple and pulling Oswald’s arms tighter around him. “I liked all of it.”

“Me too.”

“I like it here better though.”

“I do, too. Stable furniture. Fewer chances of contracting tetanus.”

“Fewer chances of Jim or Harvey Bullock walking in.”

“They’d better not walk in! I told Olga to shoot them on sight.”  
  
Ed huffs out another laugh, coughing lightly as his sore throat objects to the agitation. Many things about this are better than before: location, company, well-articulated intentions… Better than not only their encounters in the morgue, but better than all encounters, all company.

“I meant what I said earlier, Ed,” he whispers, oddly somber for the location. “I _am_ sorry. Not just for you; for her, too. She couldn't help what happened. If I’d kept it together--“

“‘If-history’ doesn’t work,” he says, covering his hand with bandaged fingers. "At least she was only doing what she was conditioned to do. That abomination at the bank just wanted to hurt. Selina doesn’t need that.“

“No she doesn’t,” he agrees. “If I may broach the subject?”

“Go ahead.”

“I don’t understand why you didn’t call me if Cat was missing.“

“Delayed, not missing. And even if it turned out to be nothing, it was the Court of Owls, Oswald. I had to check. I’m not a monster.”

Oswald, even soft and sleepy, side-steps the deflection.  
  
“You still need to call me next time. I love you but you can’t disappear without telling me where you are.”

A pause in the dark. A soft gasp as Oswald seems to realize what he said. Ed reaches down to still the arm reflexively withdrawing from his waist, bringing Oswald’s left hand up to bury itself in his hair. No more holding their breath.

“I love you, too.”

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from Thom Gunn's "Tamer and Hawk."
> 
> So, to kind of inform where my head was at when, I watched _IT: Chapter Two_ , _Je Tu Il Elle_ , and _The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan: Supermasochist_ when I was drafting and editing this. I also made a [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/07PV8Lt40lkw2Mc0lYhFXk?si=YX4NcZ5MQJy6jCbixSjxuQ).
> 
> [Tumblr](https://arcanemoody.tumblr.com/).


End file.
